This is something I posted elsewhere end of last year but it should certainly be here too.
Last December, Econsultancy released its fourth Customer Engagement Report.
The edition 2010 of the Customer Engagement Report, produced in association with cScape, found that the proportion of surveyed businesses who regard customer engagement as “essential” has risen to a record 55%.
According to the report “customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships, which result in value both for customers and for companies”.
37% of the surveyed companies describe their interest in customer engagement as increasing long term customer value and 35% as increasing value delivered to the customer.
However, according to the survey the biggest area of increased interest since last year is in “strengthening emotional investment in your brand”.
Record increase for Twitter but email marketing rules online customer engagement
The percentage of respondents saying their interest in customer engagement relates to this has risen to 31% (last year is it was 25%).
If I hear this, I immediately think social media, conversations and the likes of course. So it will probably not come as a surprise that many surveyed companies are focusing on social media as tactics to drive customer engagement.
The report found that since last year presence on social networks has almost doubled while micro-blogging (yes, you can say Twitter) has gone up five-fold.
However, the tactic that is most likely to have resulted in a tangible improvement to an organisation’s online customer engagement is still good old email marketing, more precisely email newsletters.
67% of respondents said that frequently sent email bulletins have had a positive effect. That’s 2% less than last year’s survey but still enough to remain by far the most important customer engagement tactic.
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Email marketing can also help generate new customers for you by providing your audience with the automated option to ‘forward to my friend’ within your newsletter. If you gain interest from a new customer through a referral then a lot of the hard work building a relationship has already been done for you.